6) The process of improving your writing forces you to clarify your ideas

Good writing is not only a result of clear thinking; it is also a cause of it. The process of writing forces you to plan and structure your thoughts, to clarify exactly what you mean, and to make your case in a logical and persuasive way.

Very often when I’m writing an article or a report I will change my opinion on the subject during the writing. You might expect this would happen during the research – that I would read around the subject, speak to experts, and then form an opinion – but that’s not always the case. In fact very often I find that where I do form an opinion at that stage, once I start writing I find all sorts of holes in my argument.

Pushing half-baked opinions and viewpoints through the white heat of the writing process can cut out our lazy assumptions, it can make us rigorously question our beliefs, and it can drive us to nail down exactly what we want to write. The outcome is that when we do write it, we are much more confident and vastly more compelling.

Sometimes the result of this process is that I discover I don’t have anything worth writing. I find out that my view on the subject is either hackneyed or ill-informed. In those cases I stop writing on the subject. At least it’s me who finds that out, not my readers.

How many thoroughly ordinary ideas are made to look great because they’re expressed well? And how many great ideas never get noticed because they weren’t expressed well?

Perhaps a few geniuses have already invented a perpetual motion machine, found a cure for cancer, or even figured out the meaning of life, but have been so poor at communicating their ideas that no one has understood them. How frustrating would that be?

Chances are that your business ideas are less impressive than that, but they still deserve to be heard. You might be an outstanding verbal communicator and you might be able to explain your great ideas in that way, but if you are to reach as many people as possible, if you are to give full expression to those ideas, you need to learn to write well.

Badly written documents tend to be long, dense affairs that take hours to read and often do more to confuse than to clarify. Instructions remain unclear so either the reader goes ahead and probably does the wrong thing or they have to go back and seek clarification from the writer. Either way this adds in time to the project. Someone somewhere has to pay for that wasted time.

The brief is unclear so either the company wastes time producing a proposal that fails to meet the mark or they have to go back and seek clarification. Again, poor writing adds in unnecessary steps. It makes business less efficient.

Think of any type of written business communication and in every case writing well would save time and increase efficiency. Of course it takes time at the beginning to learn how to do it well, and then it requires that little extra effort planning, crafting and editing the document to get it right first time, but it saves time in the long run.

Bad writing lies at the heart of so much misunderstanding in the business world. It could be you choose an ambiguous word, or even the wrong word, and then wonder why the person who works for you doesn’t do what you want them to.

It could be imprecise grammar that means a prospective customer misses the key point of your sales pitch. Or it could be an ill-considered structure that means your boss never gets to the end of your report and so fails to notice the good work you’ve done.

There are so many ways that bad writing can damage not only your business relationships, but also your business revenues. I firmly believe that good business writing is all about clarity of communication. It is about avoiding ambiguity.

The fundamental point is that good business writing is all about good business. Be clear, be accurate, be direct and you will reap the benefits.

Not everyone, when presented with poor writing, takes the time and trouble to wade through it. Many just conclude that the author is either careless or stupid and don’t waste their time reading it.

Can you blame them? How much time do you spend in clothes shops where the material looks cheap and the products are badly displayed? How often do you go back to a restaurant where the staff were rude and the food under-cooked?

You could argue that those are fatal flaws because it was a problem with the basic product or service. You could argue that, unless you’re a professional writer, writing isn’t essential. Why should a clothes retailer, a restaurateur, or an accountant, recruitment consultant, or website designer for that matter waste time getting their writing spot on?

For the same reasons that they invest in branding, marketing, or for that matter for the same reasons that they bother dressing smartly for work and talking coherently when they’re there. Writing is one of the ways we present ourselves to the world, and if we take no care of it, if we pay no attention to it, people will think less of us.

In the last few blog posts I’ve explained to you why I’m writing this book on business writing. I’m now turning my attention to why you should be interested in it. Why exactly does writing well matter?

Some wonder why this question needs to be answered. “Rules are rules,” they tell us – “They’re meant to be obeyed”. I don’t subscribe to this view. Just because rules exist it doesn’t mean we have to follow them. Personally I always need to see a clear, logical reason why I should do something, and I’m assuming you’re the same.

If you’re not, if you prefer to keep your life simple and follow rules just because they’re there, then you can skip this chapter. Lucky you -you can spend more time focusing on how to get it right. If though you are like me and need first to understand why you should get it right, here are seven reasons why I believe good business writing matters.

1) Bad writing is rude to your readers

I might not believe in rules but I do believe in good manners, and asking someone to read badly written text is just plain rude.

If you fail to use the correct punctuation you make it hard for the reader to know when sentences end and finish, what is speech and what not, where one idea ends and another begins, and so on. It’s the equivalent of someone asking you directions and you mumbling something about it being “up there, somewhere a bit further on”. It’s not very helpful.

Poor structure and clunky flow means the reader has to stop, re-read, and try to put your thoughts into a logical order. You shouldn’t be asking them to do that; you should be polite enough to do it for them.

Perhaps the worst of all is forcing your readers to wade through a morass of jargon, management-speak, vague words and generic phrases. We all know how that feels: it’s mind-numbingly dull. Your mind wanders, you have to fight to pay attention, and you constantly feel that perhaps it’s you, the reader, who is just too stupid to understand this complex, dense text.

If they have the option they’ll probably stop reading, but if they don’t then you’ve condemned them to spend time being bored. What could be ruder than that?

This post is part of my series on business writing. In the last post I concluded by saying that over the 15 or so years I’ve been in the business world I’ve identified five types of non-writer. Of course everyone has their own personal view on writing, on how relevant it is to them and their work, but these five types seem to crop up very frequently, and be responsible for a lot of the bad writing out there. Here then are those five types:

1) The busy executive

Most likely to say: “I would love to have the time to write – in fact when I was younger I used to want to be a journalist – but now I’m too busy with proper work to focus on writing well.”

The busy executive type sees writing as subordinate to proper work. They tell themselves that it would be lovely to have the luxury of time to express themselves well in writing, but the simple fact is that they live in the real world. And the real world is about making money.

What these busy executives fail to recognise is that writing well isn’t just something that it’s nice to do, but is an essential part of business success. Perhaps they imagine we business writers are some kind of romantic Byron-esque characters too caught up in musing on a fey phrase to sully our minds with commerce. They’re wrong. Business writing is writing with the goal of doing business more effectively – business writing is about making more money.

2) The meetings specialist

Most likely to say: “I’m more of a people kind of person”

We’ve all met people like this. People who are fluent and articulate in person, but seem unable to translate that into their written communications. Often you wonder if it was really them who wrote the document.

Very often these people are quite capable writers, but they either freeze up when presented with a blank page and feel that they would rather just have another meeting, or they don’t have enough time to dedicate to writing well because they’re rushing off to their next meeting.

Good writing can never replace face-to-face communications, but it is an essential complement.

3) The corporate waffler

Most likely to say: “I prefer to see writing as a way of empowering my stakeholders in a synergistic progression towards the organisational achievement of strategised goals across territories.”

How did the business world start to speak and write like that? Who knows? Who cares – the more pressing point is that it needs to stop. Right here, right now, we need to get hold of these people and shake this virus out of them. We need to make it crystal clear that speaking in incomprehensible jargon and management speak is neither clever nor acceptable.

We need to see through it, to realise that very often people use it as a way of covering up the fact that they have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about, and we need to challenge them on it. Ask them exactly what a strategised goal is and how it differs from a normal goal.

More than anything else we need to save these people from themselves. After all, it can’t be any sort of fun having to speak and write like that day in, day out.

4) The zeitgeisty tweeter

Most likely to say: “Chill out dude. It’s like 2010 now.”

In some quarters concern over writing is seen as almost quaint. To some people the idea of planning a written communication, taking care over its production and then rigorously editing it reeks of dusty libraries and tweed jackets with patches at the elbows. To these people punctuation and spelling are about as relevant as the Corn Laws.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for 21st Century communication and I can blog, tweet and post with the best of them, but I see no reason why living in this super-fast, always-on world should in any way be incompatible with writing well. Indeed I believe it makes it all the more important. We have so little time to make our point that we need to marshal our words as well as we possibly can.

5) The deliberate obscurantist

Most likely to say: “My style just isn’t that simplistic”

This is the only type of non-writer who really gets on my nerves. The others I can understand, even empathise with to some extent, but the deliberate obscurantist – those people who consciously try to confuse readers, who purposefully hide meaning behind mangled language – I have very little time for.

Thankfully they are few and far between, but sadly they do exist. They know what they’re doing and they know that it’s wrong. It’s time we all recognised what they’re doing and stopped them getting away with it.

So those are the five types of non-writer. Which one are you? Post a comment or send me an e-mail to let me know. Have I missed any? Do you know of any particularly good examples of any of those types?

Over these last four posts I hope I have made it clear why business writing matters so much to me. I’ll now move on to explain why I believe it ought to matter to you.